A/N: None.

2

elegance

A young Ino had given Sakura a cosmos flower with the reassurance that she could be feminine. Sakura pressed the petals against a page and wished to become a kunoichi, all flowing hair, glossy lips, demure, downcast eyes, a woman veiled with convenient emotions, calculating how many seconds she would need to attain her objective.

A young Sasuke sparred with a young Naruto, flicking kunais into the air and laying sweeping kicks and a blazing katon that scorched her decidedly unfeminine heart. Sakura sat on the bench a safe distance away, hands pressed into her knobby knees. She knew that was the reason she pushed Naruto away whenever he said his "ne, ne, Sakura-chan," whenever he tried to pull her into the center of his gravity: they were alike in their clumsy, fumbling, dough-limbed movements. Decidedly inelegant. The thought soured her lips into a frown.

Sakura had thought she was past all this, this business, this preoccupation of her youth, but as she watched Sai out of the corner of an eye she tasted the same sour disappointment as before. His pianist's fingers drew his brush from its case and in one fell swoop, he made the wet, black tip dance across the wide sheaf of a scroll, dance to a music only he could hear. Sai was the conductor of his creatures, balancing the artistic with the technicality of combat, and she envied him for that as she slammed a fist and the ground erupted. In a decidedly inelegant fashion, she mused churlishly as she surveyed her work with a dispassionate eye: trees splayed like bodies, torn at the roots, boulders sectioned into great, uneven chunks, tufts of grass dotting the crater, and the exposed body of the earth, dark, almost black dirt that smelled like rain.

Clouds of dust, everywhere, but all she saw was the inelegance of her destruction.

Sakura relaxed her stance and straightened. She swiped the back of a glove across her slick forehead, steadying her breath. Sai swooped down near her, dropping from one of his bird paintings.

"Quite a mess you've made, Hag," he said by way of acknowledging the end of their spar.

"I said I wouldn't hold back," she said tartly. How unfair. She looked away. She shouldn't be upset at him, he couldn't even begin to understand - -

"Hmm," said Sai, contemplation knitting his brows. "I've always wondered about this, but there is a kind of senseless destruction to your insane strength." He tucked a hand under his chin as he appraised the scene of her crime, finger tapping. He tilted his head, squeezed one eye shut, then the other. "Yes," he muttered. "I see now."

Sai turned to her. His dark eyes seemed to glow with the kind of muted surprise of one who was looking in a mirror. "You have the artist's sensibility about you, too."

Sakura nearly lost the grip of her water bottle. "I don't - - what?"

"Art requires senselessness sometimes," said Sai, crouching down. He smoothed out a length of a scroll and withdrew his brush. He pressed it to paper. "No thought," he slashed across the page, "No blueprints," he looped across the page, "Only raw energy." Sakura watched in fascination as his hand moved as if of its own accord, a hand detached from the body, no longer dancing but flying in loops and jagged sweeps.

"Art is making and unmaking."

Sai leaned away to scrutinize his creation as a whole. Sakura saw lines upon lines upon lines but slowly, she could make out the curve of a thigh, the gloved claw digging into the ground - - it was her, fierce and unpolished, visually striking in its roughness.

Sakura did not understand what he was yakking on about; perhaps another artist would understand, would seize a brush of his or her own and join in the frenzied painting, would hmm thoughtfully and agree with a sagely nod.

"Hmm," said Sakura, as thoughtfully as she could. "I see now."

Sai smiled, a tiny quirk of lips, and she thought she could understand what he meant.